The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
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The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
336eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374107 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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The Brink of Freedom
Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
By David Kazanjian
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7410-7
CHAPTER 1
"It All Most Cost Us Death Seeking Life"
Recursive Returns and Unsettled Nativities
This is an auspicious day for Liberia, and for West Africa ... Perhaps this very day, one century ago, some of our forefathers were being dragged to the hold of some miserable slaver, to enter upon those horrible sufferings of the "middle passage," preliminary to their introduction into scenes and associations of deeper woe. Today, their descendants having escaped the fiery ordeal of oppression and slavery, and having returned to their ancestral home, are laying the foundation of intellectual empire, upon the very soil whence their fathers were torn, in their ignorance and degradation. Strange and mysterious providence!
— EDWARD WILMONT BLYDEN, "Address at the Inauguration of Liberia College," 1862
Edward Wilmont Blyden spoke these words in Monrovia to inaugurate Liberia College on January 23, 1862. Blyden was born free in St. Thomas in 1832, and emigrated to Liberia in the 1850s, where he quickly became a leading member of the recently independent country's elite and subsequently became one of the most iconic settler-colonial representatives of early Liberia. In Blyden's "scenes" of the enslaved introduced to "horrible sufferings" as if they were performed for the stage or composed on a canvas, we can likely recognize the aesthetics of the abolitionist movement. If an "inauguration" is "the formal introduction of something into public use," as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, then the "auspiciousness" of this day's formal introduction of "intellectual empire" into public use lies in the symmetry framing the middle passage. On one side of the "miserable slaver," Blyden offers the "ignorance and degradation" of Africans before slavery; on the other side, he offers the "deeper woe" of Afro-diasporans under slavery. As important to Blyden's inauguration, however, is the discourse of return by which these symmetrical "scenes of subjection," to borrow Saidiya Hartman's term, are recast and repaired. With the figure of return, Blyden transforms a static symmetry of subjection into a meliorist trajectory of freedom, in which the "descendants" of Africa "escape" slavery, reunite with a lost fatherland, and establish an imperial future. In this, Blyden also performs what I have elsewhere called — drawing on David Walker's critique of the colonization movement in his 1829 Appeal — a "colonizing trick," or the articulation of racial and national codification with formal equality in the figure of the imperial citizen. This imperial citizenship further founds, and is founded upon, a patriarchal kinship of "forefathers" and "fathers," which supplants the presumably impoverished, extended kinships that thrived under slavery. Liberia College is here called upon to inaugurate an "intellectual empire" of Liberian citizenship with the black settler colonization of West Africa, displacing West Africans who are presumably still "ignorant" and "degraded" with Afro-diasporans who have been emancipated from slavery's sufferings. "Return" is offered as the meliorist form of "intellectual empire"; it presents a counter-aesthetic to Blyden's scenes of subjection.
Blyden's "colonizing trick" did not, however, settle Liberia, which throughout the nineteenth century remained an unsettled state on many levels. As I mentioned in the prelude, between 1821 and 1847 it was a colony over which no state formally exercised sovereignty, having been founded and ruled by the private philanthropic organization the American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1847, Liberian independence was declared by black American settler-colonists, many of whom had been freed from slavery so that the ACS could deport and settle them on lands appropriated by coercive "fee simple" treaties with, or expropriated at gunpoint from, West Africans. The newly independent black settler-colonists, in turn, promptly disenfranchised those very West Africans. During its colonial years of forced settlement and conquest, then, Liberia was never formally settled by or as a state; in turn, after its independence Liberia disenfranchised its native inhabitants, generating antagonistic ethnic and class distinctions that have echoed throughout the country's twentieth- and twenty-first-century civil conflicts.
However, those black settlers who came to live in colonial Liberia also lived unsettled states of being or life that cannot be reduced to the formal, political, and governmental history I just sketched and upon which they reflected in letters written to their former masters, families, and friends in the United States. These unsettled lives can be heard in a set of letters written by H. B. Stewart, a carpenter and Presbyterian minister freed and deported to Liberia at the age of forty-two. Stewart's letters amplify the unsettling backbeat this epistolary archive sounds in and through even his Blydenesque representations of Africa as an ancestral homeland, questioning the meaning of freedom in the afterlife of slavery rather than inaugurating "intellectual empire."
Stewart, his freeborn wife, and their eight children left Savannah on May 14, 1849, on the ship Huma and arrived in Greenville, Liberia — located about 150 miles southeast of Monrovia — on June 27, 1849. On the one hand, his twenty-two extant letters exhibit an unbridled enthusiasm for African colonization. Writing to ACS treasurer Rev. William McLain on October 20, 1849, he declares: "I am truly thankful to god in inabeling me with my large family in coming to this Land of Liberty whear I can in Joy Equel Rights and Woshop my god without fear. The Laws Ear good and Ear farly adminesterd without parshality I has not seen Eny Riotus person Sines I have Ben in the plac infact I have seen Beter order hear sins I have Ben hear than at home the peope Sems to Be more frade of the Laws hear than at home." Although in the next paragraph he admits to "a very great dissatisfaction here" due to the shortage of food and the prevalence of "the Acclamating fevers," he still manages over the next few years to express enthusiasm, even casting it in the very "return to Africa" terms Blyden would use to inaugurate Liberia College. In a September 26, 1851, letter to Rev. McLain, Stewart writes: "The times take Courage and are Looking with Anxious Desire to the Day when the Long Despurse sons of ham will Return to the Land of there Four Fathers." Indeed, as late as 1857 Stewart again draws on the figure of the Sons of Ham to ground his support for Liberia's mission: "It is Scarcely needed for me to Say to you," he writes to ACS official Ralph R. Gurley on August 8, "how it made our hearts gladen with the Prospects of in no Distant Day, our feble hand will be again Strong then with more of the Sable Sons of ham. May they Be helpers in the Greate Work in the Civillisation of Down troden Africa."
On the other hand, Stewart's letters unsettle this enthusiasm. On December 19, 1856, he wrote to McLain about a settler who left his family in Liberia for the United States: "information of a Reliable Source have Reached us that Henry M. Mitchell, or Clarke as he Sometimes calls himself, who Left the Rpublic of Liberia Some 18 month Ago or more, has Abandoned the Idea of Returning Leaving his Lawful wife and Poor mother, upwards of 80 years of Eage upon the Charities of the Public if so, it's horribly in the Extreme I hope it is not so." On the same day Stewart wrote nearly identical lines to Gurley, adding that Mitchell "left here with the idea of Purchasing some of his Children in Georgia." Five months later, he offered McLain an update on "the foul act of mitchell" who "ought to of been in Some Public Gazette that his villinay might be made known": "Since writing to you Last, his mother Died. I had her Buried decently, his wife Speakes of Returning to the States." Stewart here reveals that ongoing, transatlantic kinships could figure "life" as much or more than Blyden's claims of geographic ancestry and imperial mission. In fact, in 1857 even Stewart calls Liberia "a foreign Land" to Gurley, and in 1858 he writes of the United States as "home."
Finally, in the last of his extant letters — written on August 17, 1868, to ACS secretary William Coppinger — Stewart himself contemplates a different "Return" than the one he enthusiastically trumpeted in 1851, foregrounding the exhaustion of grand paternal quests and the appeal of a more plural and diffuse sense of kinship:
your Suggestion of my making a visit to the united States of america Strikes me faveable, for Several Reasons, first, I wants Rest. I have been preaching Every Sabbath for the last Eight years. Seconly, I have a Brother and three Sisters in Liberty County, Ga., with Some twelve or fifteen Children. Could or would the Society give me a free passage over in their Ship, and also my Wife ... I will have friends when I arrive. If these Ends Could be met, I would be Ready to Leave on the Return Ship.
Blyden's 1862 embrace of Africa as a fatherland — apparently shared by Stewart himself in the early 1850s — loses its grip here. The proposed "Return" is unlocatable on Blyden's map of "intellectual empire"; it does not form a symmetry of subjection, nor does it count down to freedom's punctual arrival. Stewart's epistolary speculations end not so much with "Ends" meeting as with the expectation of a freedom yet to come, as well as the unsettling suggestion that such freedom might come from the past as much as from the future, from slavery as much as from citizenship, from transatlantic kinships as much as from the return to a putative fatherland.
From this perspective, consider an account Stewart gives in the September 26, 1851, letter to McLain I mentioned above — just a few sentences after writing about the moment "when the Long Despurse sons of ham will Return to the Land of there Four Fathers" — of a debate he witnessed in Greenville:
I was much pleas in Lisening a few Eavning ago to a very anamating discussion in the Corse of a Lecture Between the Rev. James M. Priest & Dr. James Brown on the word Emulation, introduced By the former, that the word Emulation may be Applied in a Bad Sence or a Bad [good?] Sence. The Later Gentlemen (Dr. Brown) Disagreed that a good Emulation & a Bad Emulation that they Are not strcly Belonging to the same family, A contridiction in tearms &c. Sir, it was amusing To see how Each tride to sustained their point Jhonson & Webster & som time a Little Latin, and so you will see we are not asleep all ways.
The Dr. James Brown of whom Stewart writes immigrated to Liberia in 1836, and eventually became a member of the town council of Monrovia and later of Liberia's first Senate. In turn, the "James M. Priest" to whom Stewart refers could be the same man who later became vice president of Liberia (1864–68) as well as a member of Liberia's Supreme Court. Beyond these details, it is difficult to learn more about the contours of this debate between two settler elites over the meaning and value of the word "emulation." Nonetheless, Stewart's 1851 account offers us something like an anti- or, more precisely, an ante-inaugural for Blyden's 1862 inauguration of an "intellectual empire." While "emulation" can mean "imitation," it also carries the sense of striving to equal or surpass another, from its Latin root aemulus meaning "competing with." One wonders whether Liberia's complex relationship to the United States — which was at once one of differentiation and imitation — informed this debate, and whether Stewart's interest was especially piqued precisely because of his own equivocal understanding of Liberia and the United States as homelands of different sorts. If so, this "anamating discussion" about "the word Emulation" staged its own sort of return to the United States, as Brown, Priest, Stewart, and the rest of those in attendance reflected on the relationship between the two countries. The passage could even be said to cast into doubt the entire scene of applied knowledge and meliorist emancipation that underwrites African colonization by raising the question of whether one can differentiate between good and bad returns, whether emulation can ever be mastered enough to be properly "applied" to the development of freedom, and whether such mastery is itself a "contridiction in tearms." In this "very animating discussion ... on the word Emulation," which returns to us from the epistolary archive of early Liberia, we can perhaps hear how return's meliorist presumptions, so crucial to Blyden's "colonizing trick," are backbeat by their own undoing. With Stewart, that is, we can be "pleas in Lisening" to how each effort to settle such a question — "in a Bad sence or a [good] sence" — opens upon its own unsettlement.
Unfortunately, much contemporary scholarship has foreclosed questions about Liberia's unsettled lives because it has been organized around two conflicting, but decidedly settled, interpretations of the black settler-colonists: a Blydenesque return-to-Africa interpretation, in which those settler-colonists are represented as freedom-seeking ex-slaves returning to their ancestral homeland; and an anti-imperial interpretation, in which the settler-colonists and their white sponsors are represented as unjustly imposing their will upon innocent West African natives. As opposed as these two interpretations seem, they both emphasize histories of settlement over reflection on Liberia's unsettled lives by taking for granted the willful autonomy of the settlers and the meaning of the freedom they sought. In the case of the return-to-Africa interpretation, black American settlers are assumed to have settled their own freedom by leaving chattel slavery in the United States for national citizenship in the putative land of their forebears; in the case of the anti-imperial interpretation, black American colonists and/or their white sponsors are assumed to have settled their own imperial rule by rapaciously wresting land and freedom from West Africans.
In this chapter, I unsettle Blyden's "intellectual empire" as well as the stark choice between the return-to-Africa interpretation and the anti-imperial intepretation by attending to speculative dimensions of the epistolary archive of early Liberia. In this archive one rarely finds the settler-colonists simply or straightforwardly imagining Africa as their original homeland, or disdaining native West Africans as savages to be killed or converted, or writing of freedom as something to be calculated, owned, accumulated, authorized by a state, developed from capitalist relations of production, earned by the conversion of non-Christians, appropriated for individuals, or expropriated from others. Or perhaps I should say that one does find all of those tropes for Liberian freedom in the letters, yet those tropes are never simple or straightforward because they are persistently set in apposition to more equivocal and capacious accounts of the effort to live a free life in Liberia with, among, and against native West Africans and in the wake of slavery's ongoing legacies. Consequently, we should read the letters contrapuntally, attending to the ways those familiar tropes — which seem to lend themselves either to the return-to-Africa interpretation or to the anti-imperialist interpretation — are continually undone.
To limn this undoing, I first trace a genealogy of the two predominant interpretations of African colonization to the late eighteenth-century writings of two influential black diasporans: Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano. Their respective involvements with the British colony of Sierra Leone proved foundational for the ACS's colonization of Liberia, and at first glance they seem to fall neatly into — and thus to inaugurate — the anti-imperial interpretation (Wheatley) and the return-to-Africa interpretation (Equiano). By looking closely at Wheatley's and Equiano's texts, however, I argue that African colonization was, at its black diasporan foundations, a site of more equivocal thought about how to live a free life in the Atlantic world than either interpretation grants. I then turn to the epistolary archive in order to show how the settlers' reflections on "return" and "the natives" elaborate this eighteenth-century tradition, generating a speculative body of thought about living unsettled states of being or life.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction. Atlantic Speculations, Quotidian Globalities 1Part I. Liberia: Epistolary Encounters
Prelude 35
1. It All Most Cost Us Death Seeking Life: Recursive Returns and Unsettled Nativities 53
2. Suffering Gain and It Remain: The Speculative Freedom of Early Liberia 91
Part II. Yucatán: Una Guerra Escrita
Prelude 133
3. En Sus Futuros Destinos: Casta Capitalism 155
4. Por Eso Peleamos: Recasting Libertad 191
Coda: Archives for the Future 227
Acknowledgments 239
Notes 243
Bibliography 285
Index 315
What People are Saying About This
"The Atlantic world exceeds itself when David Kazanjian sounds its everyday archives of futurity and fugitivity, showing us that the transformation of how we do things, of how little and how much we’re willing to take, of how we come to imagine the materiality of our own transverse earthliness, is the making of history. Kazanjian discovers and extends the poetics of that making at The Brink of Freedom. Who could ask for anything more?"
"Standing out for its breadth, analytical clarity, and sophistication, The Brink of Freedom makes a monumental intervention to unfolding narratives of freedom. Embodying the new American Studies, it will be widely read in literature and cultural studies courses with a historicist or Atlantic orientation. This book's brilliance is dazzling."